Seniors are boundaryless
If you work as a software developer in France, what ever your age, you might go from junior to senior in 5 years (or 3 during the golden 2020-2022 era).
It is more a matter of time rather than skills.
For a long time, I thought seniority was a pure concern of skill-level.
I had a negative opinion about people coming from bootcamps and retrainings, as for me, having a solid-enough understanding takes time.
But I was biased because I would say I have done my initial learning of software engineering 95% on my own, with books, blog posts, videos, side projects.
I have changed my position few months ago, as I realized initial learning can be done in a community.
It takes soft-skills, but it is required to gain in seniority, and many people considered "seniors" do not have them.
My position changed also because I realized that, during hiring, I was looking maybe more for soft-skills rather than software engineering skills.
On another hand, if we look at big tech software engineering career plan, they use impact scope to rank seniority:
- Junior: Task
- Intermediate: Feature
- Senior: Project/Product/Team
- Staff: Team(s)/Department/Field
- Principal: Department/Field/Company
- Distinguished: Field/Industry
And this is the thing, few months ago, I was talking with a coworker, stating that I was mostly a backend developer, and he has said: "but you have touched everything".
I think this is the point, whenever a senior software has an objective, there are no limits:
- writing frontend/backend code
- reworking UI/UX
- pivoting the infrastructure
- challenging business units and requirements
A senior software is someone which goes wherever they need to, exploring like a child, not forgetting what they have learnt.
Some has said once "everyone wants a fullstack software engineer, until it challenges the business", but this is what make seniors, the ability to operate everywhere, even outside there "assigned" areas.
It is something to keep in mind, if someone tries to segregate a software engineer, in the short-term they want to force a suboptimal solution, and in the long-term they want to prevent growth.